The saying that “a picture says a thousand words” certainly rings true these days when putting your Saint Lucia home up for sale. Digital technology and social media have revolutionized the real estate industry. Its important to know that 80% of property hunters are now starting their search for a home online and over 25%-30% of buyers reportedly first decided on the home they eventually purchased based on photographs they saw online. With the advent of more user-friendly and highly interactive real estate websites and the convenience of virtual tours, buyers are literally touring homes and deciding on their property purchases from the comfort of their living rooms. Well if a picture’s worth a thousand words then what does your real estate listing photographs say about your St. Lucia property?
In Melanie Gardiner’s real estate article ”Shoot for the Best” veteran photographer and director of Urban Angles, John Wheatley, reportedly says that the average buyer spends just 8 seconds initially reviewing real estate images. With mere seconds in which to impress your prospective buyer, what will your real estate listing photographs say about your St Lucia property? Will it entice a buyer to request a viewing of your home or will it create a bad impression of your property?
How Digital Technology is Changing St Lucia Real Estate
The quality of photography used when listing your St Lucia homes will very likely determine how many property hunters will take an interest in taking an actual tour of your home. High quality, attractive photos will most likely convert a property hunter to a buyer. Quite unfortunately many property owners underestimate the power of quality photographs. Too often, St. Lucia home owners don’t make enough of an effort in making their homes presentable and visually appealing, with the result that they often provide shabby photos for listing their St. Lucia real estate. Still many St Lucia home owners are new to the business of selling their home online, can’t afford a professional photographer and don’t have sufficient basic knowledge about real estate photography.
Listing photographs have now become the main mode of advertising St Lucia real estate online. If your real estate photos are of poor quality, most buyers wont bother to visit your property. Photos often create a first impression in the buyers mind and may very well determine how much the buyer is willing to offer for the property. Poor quality photographs often suggest that the property is dilapidated and will require a lot of work before the buyer can move in. Most first time home owners are looking for properties that require very little refurbishing before they can move in, and will often be turned off if your home looks to be in poor condition.
Hire a Professional Photographer
There are many St Lucia homes are on the market right now, creating a highly competitive real estate environment. If you want to sell your St Lucia property in quick time, you have to leverage every opportunity to gain an advantage over your competitors. If you want to sell your home quickly by taking advantage of high quality photos, you may wish to hire a professional or at least consult with one. It may be money well spent as good photos can help you get your house off the market in a shorter tie frame, in a highly competitive real estate market. Starting as low as US$100-350 you can have your St Lucia home photographed professionally.
To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of real estate photography tips and tricks that you can very easily put into use, to gain a huge advantage over other home owners in the market, when listing your St Lucia home for sale or rent Never again will you miss out on the opportunity to sell you home, because of poor quality, unprofessional, unattractive photographs. We’re going share with you some simple photography tricks that will take your photos from poor to pro almost overnight.
DIY with a Digital Camera
Many homeowners are using high tech mobile phones such as the iphone4S to take high definition photos of the homes that they can readily upload online. While some home-owners have been able to capture some pretty decent photos using their mobile-cam. A regular digital camera may offer wider lens and a variety of important features, giving you the opportunity to better adjust your lens, lighting, and camera angles and improve photo quality. Placing your camera on a tripod can afford you better quality control by help you avoid shake, improve photo angles, and picture quality. Many cameras now come with light, highly portable and inexpensive tripods, as well as remote control devices that can greatly assist your photography experience.
Before taking your real estate photos, experiment with the features of your camera that you haven’t used before and see how these enhance photo quality, play with the angles and review the results, until you’re relatively comfortable with the camera and can take quality photos with ease. There are many resources online that provide valuable information for shooting incredible real estate photos.
Although the use of tripods enhances the quality of real estate photos that homeowners capture for their real estate listing, the benefits of its use is often overlooked by Saint Lucia homeowners. Professional photographer, Kathryn Learie believes that the use of tripods are essential in interior photography since one is often shooting in low light conditions that result in slower shutter speeds. She encourages the use of tripods as it helps to eliminate crooked lines in shots of both the interior and exterior of your home.
Clean Your Home
As much as this may seem obvious, too often home buyers display photographs of areas in their homes that are less than tidy. A clean environment generally gives buyers the impression that a home is well maintained with very little opportunity for unwanted surprises to surface after the deal has been closed. Be sure to clean both the exterior and interior of your home. A spotless garage or entryway, a clean carpet or rug, a well-kept kitchen or bathroom will be reflected in beautiful real estate photographs. A lot is at stake in selling your home. So if you’re not in the mood to DIY, a cleaning company may be willing to do all the dirty work at an affordable rate.
De-clutter & Reorganize
From the virtual tour to the actual site visit to your home, you need to create the right real estate experience for your prospective buyers. Buyers often want to easily visualize themselves owning your home. Even the best houses may be a hard sell if the owner’s personality overwhelms the décor, ambiance, or feel of a home. A house full of clutter usually gives prospective buyers that the house has insufficient storage space and may not adequately meet their own storage needs. Too much of your own clutter within the personal space can often detract a buyer from the ideal real estate experience, by making it hard for them to imagine the property as being their own space. It is wise for a St Lucia property owner to first depersonalize their homes by temporarily removing family photos, highly personal decorative items that appear excessive or overbearing and other personal items, as well as clearing tables, shelves, or countertops, so that buyers can better visualize themselves in the space.
The idea is to strike the right balance and keep only personal items that enhance the décor and give the home a feeling of warmth, and a sense that your home is turnkey ready. Remember to move garbage or displaced items lying in or around the home, brightly colored items that are distracting or sharply contrast with the rest of the room. Too often, a cluttered garage, walkway may steal away from the curb appeal of a home; or a broom, clothing, toy or other personal item may be seen peeking out in the most inappropriate and embarrassing places. Keep in mind the rule of three. This general rule is simply this; keep no more than 3 items on small surfaces or 6 for larger surfaces.
Reorganize furniture to enhance the look and feel of a room or to emphasize the functions of a room. Try to create a feeling of that the room is adequately furnished yet spacious. Temporarily remove furnishings and decorations that detract from the purpose a room, such as an ironing board in the dining room area. Remove general kitchen utensils and appliances that clutter kitchen countertops. De-clutter closets and storage rooms down to 20% of its usual capacity and experiment with taking photographs that highlight storage areas in your home. will also prove useful in creating a sense that your St Lucia home is spacious when prospective buyers call in for a viewing of your St Lucia property.
Before you begin to shoot photos, its best to get an independent eye to give second opinion and help you flag awkward items or adjust the placement of furniture.
Improve Lighting
Lighting is very important in producing photos that capture the buyer’s attention and imagination. It is also important to know that different rooms may look better at different times of day. Most buyers are drawn to homes that draw in natural light. When taking photos its important to select the right time of day, remove heavy drapes that obstruct light in favor of light curtains that invite natural light, open or draw the drapes in order to balance the light between the exterior and interior of your home, or turn on interior lights if necessary to create an airy and light space.
It is recommended that you take interior photos at twilight when the natural light coming in through the windows better match up with the levels of the natural interior lighting. As far as possible, keep the sun behind you to avoid shadows. If an area of the house is naturally shaded then its best to shoot photos on a party cloudy day in order to lower the contrast. Shafts of natural light coming through a room can give a warm and friendly feel to a room and may `invoke pleasant sentiments for a buyer.
Stage Your Home
A house will attract more offers and sell more easily, the more buyers ho can visualize themselves living in your home. Buyers want to know that they’re getting the most bang for their buck. Its so important to help buyers visualize themselves living in your house and enjoying it with friends and family, since ultimately it that sentiment that will convert a real estate prospect from a mere property hunter to a home owner. That’s exactly what staging your home is all about. It’s essentially grooming and decorating your house so that it appeals to a broad spectrum of qualified real estate prospects.
Staging your St Lucia property does not entail complete redecorating of your home as many imagine, do you even have to stage the entire home. It’s enough to stage the main living areas such as the living room, kitchen, dining room, and at least one bedroom. If you have a functional front or backyard it is also a great idea to highlight this additional space. Try to stage your home without breaking the bank. You can use existing decorative items, borrow furnishings and decorative items from family and friends or add a few new inexpensive pieces. Use decorative props such as fruits, a fresh vase of flowers, magazine, throw cloths, pillows, rugs, and window treatments to enhance the look of your home and to create a cozy and friendly family atmosphere. A prospective buyer should get the sense that your home fits almost perfectly with his lifestyle and home buying needs.
The idea in staging your home when taking real estate photographs is to enhance the aesthetics of your home; while enabling prospective buyers to visual functionality of a room and to see how your home readily fits into their lifestyle and meets their real estate needs. In staging a room, ensure that the functionality remains clear by removing awkward items that appear to be misfits or confuse the function of the room.
Highlight the Best Features of Your Home
It’s important to take several shots of each room, experimenting with various angles, and lighting. You can then select the best from a variety of photos. Most buyers want to see photos of the main rooms in the house (bedroom, kitchen, living room), back and front yards, if any.
It’s best to avoid displaying photographs of rooms whose purpose has been converted to an unusual purpose for your own unique purposes. It’s best to stage a bedroom as a bedroom, rather than to maintain it as a music studio or mini art gallery, for example. Most prospective homeowners will settle for an additional bedroom but don’t necessarily want a music room or craft room. Whereas a buyer might be willing to buy into a 3-bedroom house when they actually had a 2-bedroom house in mind, they may not be enticed to go over budget to accommodate a an gallery that simply wasn’t part of their initial plans. However remember that your real estate photographs and property descriptions should adequately represent your property. Buyers often don’t respond well when the house they viewed online differs significantly to what they’re actually viewing. So be sure to declare an unfinished basement and avoid representing a room as a bedroom if it really does not qualify as such.
Your real estate listing photos should help you distinguish your property of the market, by emphasizing the unique selling points of your home. Granite counter tops and hard wood floors, additional storage, low maintenance water features, beautiful lighting fixtures, contemporary bathroom fixtures, and outdoor living areas for example, are in high demand. In a highly competitive real estate environment, its important to showcase the unique and impressive features of your home, if you are to truly set your St Lucia home apart and give it an advantage over other homes competing on the market. You can significantly improve the value of the offers that you are likely to receive for your St Lucia home, by producing quality photographs that appropriately emphasis the best features and unique selling points of your home.
Useful Real Estate Photography Tips and Tricks
Whether or not you produce your real estate photographs yourself or use an architectural photography professional the importance of taking well-composed and exposed photos of your home cannot be stressed enough. If you’ve never taken real estate photographs before, you may find it quite intimidating to shoot photographs of your home, after all a lot may be riding on this. But don’t let the butterflies well up in your stomach just yet. Even if you’ve never done this before, all is not lost. You’ve taken the first and most important step by simply reading this article.
Kathryn, a professional photographer and the owner-operator of Owen Imaging based in Kamloops, B.C. says that there are no hard and fast rules for composing real estate photos. However, using a few tried and true techniques and keep in mind a few basic principles can help produce you produce near-professional looking images without the need to buy expensive equipment.
Here is a random list of simple tips and tricks on home interior photography shared by some of the photographers interviewed by Kathryn that you may apply, to take show-stopping photographs of your Saint Lucia home.
• Use a tripod to improve the angles, reduce camera shake and blurring, and to generally enhance the quality of your photographs.
• Use a wide-angle lens, because these shots can make a small room look bigger.
• Take a wide shot of your house and then take shots of specific rooms, highlighting the positive features of your home.
• For small rooms or awkward spaces, don’t shoot the whole room. Its best to capture a shot of the room that includes a small portion of the doorframe or the entrance of the room and portrays the essence of its function and décor. Your shot should nevertheless create a feeling of balance and completeness.
• Take shots from different angles so you have a variety of photographic viewpoints to compare and to choose from.
• Ensure that nothing obstructs an important part of a room or scenery by removing obstructions or awkwardly placed items.
• Use an object such as a vase, plant, or chair in the foreground to add scale and depth to the photo, particularly in an empty room.
• Create as much lighting as possible by taking photos at an appropriate time of day. Draw the blinds or turn on interior lights if you need to fill in dark areas.
• Move around slightly before taking a photo to help identify your best positioning for the photo, to significantly improve composition.
• Watch composition changes on the LCD, or viewfinder on your camera before pressing the shutter button.
• Place an odd number of accessories on surfaces or vary the size of the objects to add style and detail.
• Move furniture around to avoid taking the back of furniture or obstructing your view.
• Take photos at a time of day appropriate to the natural lighting of each room.
• Turn on exterior lights and photograph the exterior at dusk to add warmth to the photograph.
• Take exterior photographs from a perch to improve the angles that you capture.
• Remove distracting items such as cars in your garage, overhanging branches, electrical wires, garbage cans or signage before photographing a house.
• Before snapping the shutter button, review the scene to vertical or horizontal line are perpendicular.
• Avoid direct sunlight in a room, as this tends to create dark shadows and contrasting highlights. Instead limit overexposure to your photo and shoot photos under optimal lighting conditions by taking advantage of subdued lighting conditions.
• Ensure that your white balance is set correctly by having the camera on the proper scene mode, or set your camera to auto so that your camera makes its selection automatically.
• Align the edges of your photo with a vertical line from a wall or window frame.
• Create polished results, using simple photo editing technology to create a professional finish. Edit, crop, resize or touch up your photographs to remove overhanging branches, electric poles or wires, extensions of neighboring properties that clutter the exterior of the property or detract from it.
There are plenty of online resources that will teach you all the tricks and techniques for taking picture perfect photographs of your St Lucia home that will surely grab the attention of any serious buyer. Social media sites offer an endless supply of useful information on taking real estate photos that will sell your house. On his YouTube Channel, camera/video guy, John Cooksey of Elite Video, gives you a brief introduction to the digital camera to make you an expert in no time. In another amazing video he reveals “The 7 Secrets of Real Estate Photography.” In it, he gives a very inspiring insight into real estate photography, which is bound to set even someone who is completely new to real estate photography on the right track.
June Fletcher of The Wall Street Journal in an incredible online publication entitled “ The Best Shot: A Photography Lesson for Home Seller,” compiles a list of offers incredible real estate photography tips offered by professional architectural photographers across the United States that are simple and easy to put into practice.
If you’re want to sharpen up your real estate photography skills, then consider getting yourself a book to help you master the essential skills of photography in quick time. There are many such resources on the market that are readily accessible in just one click. Ed Wolkis, an award winning commercial and architectural photographer based in Atlanta, in his book “How to Take Photos that Move Houses,” provides a fun easy reading guide for anyone who needs to show a property in its best light. This beautifully illustrated text provides a step-by-step guide with simple to advanced tips and techniques for producing show stopping real estate photos that will grab a prospective buyer’s attention ”The book, inclusive of dramatic before and after photo demonstration and tips for selecting a suitable digital camera and taking advantage of its features to deliver quality photos.
One of the main keys to successful online real estate listing is to display quality photographs. It’s not enough to simply post your property on a website that generates high volumes of online traffic. Increased competition in the St Lucia real estate market demands that you grab a property hunters attention in quick time and convincingly. Having phenomenal real estate photos to market your St Lucia home will go a long way in helping get your home off the market quickly, at your desired price. In today’s highly competitive real estate market you cannot afford to underestimate the power of well composed real estate photos in selling your house. If your real estate listing photos go unnoticed, then most likely your St Lucia property may also go unnoticed. So if you’re serious about selling your house fast and extracting the best bargain that you can from your real estate deal, you should spare no effort in obtaining high quality, attractive photographs. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, what will your real estate listing photographs say about your property?
